Context: China began operating the world's second-largest hydropower station " Baihetan Hydropower Station " in what officials hailed as a milestone towards Beijing's carbon neutrality goals, despite warnings of environmental damage.

• Once fully operational, the Baihetan Hydropower Station should eliminate the need to burn 20 million tons of coal annually: Report

Key Points

• The first two generating units of the world's second-biggest hydroelectric dam were officially turned on in southwestern China, the government announced.
• The Baihetan Dam on the Jinsha River, a tributary of the Yangtze.
• It is part of Chinese efforts to curb surging fossil fuel demand by building more hydropower capacity at a time when dams have fallen out of favor in other countries due to environmental complaints.
• The announcement comes ahead of the ruling Communist Party's celebration this week of the official 100th anniversary of its 1921 founding.
• Plans call for the 289-meter-tall (954-foot-tall) Baihetan Dam to have 16 generating units with a capacity of 1 million kilowatts each. That will make it second in size after the Three Gorges Dam, opened in 2003 on the Yangtze, with 22.5 million kilowatts of generating capacity.
• Both were built by the state-owned Three Gorges Group Corp., the world's biggest investor in hydro, solar and wind generation.

Importance of this Project

• Hydropower is losing support in other countries due to complaints dams flood communities and farmland and disrupt the ecology of rivers, threatening fish and other species.
• Despite criticism by environmentalists, Chinese leaders are building more dams in an effort to reduce reliance on coal and to curb surging demand for imported oil and gas.
• China is a leader in developing ultra-high-voltage, or UHV, transmission technology to move power from dams in the southwest to Shanghai and other eastern cities.
• It should eliminate the need to burn 20 million tons of coal annually.

Concerns associated with construction of dams

• The environmental groups have criticised the over-engineering of the river has destroyed major habitats and damaged natural flood plains.
• The construction of dams has resulted in problems like excessive sedimentation and salinity, waterlogging, sudden floods, soil erosion, large scale deforestation, extinction of species.
• The Inter-state river water disputes are also the result of sharing the water resources and high cost of construction and maintenance.
• The massive engineering projects have also displaced hundreds of thousands of local communities and prompted concern in neighbouring countries.
• The impact of dams on China's portion of the Mekong has also raised fears that irreversible damage is being inflicted upon a waterway which feeds 60 million people downstream as it winds through to the Vietnamese Delta.